In Memory of Eleanor Margaret Hayes

The summer I turned twelve she taught me to make her shortbread by feel, not measurement. "The dough will tell you," she said, and somehow it did. I have made it every Christmas since.

Forty-one years she was my friend. She forgot precisely nothing — not a birthday, not a slight, not a kindness. The good and the bad were equally durable in her keeping. I will miss being remembered by her.

Eleanor hired me in 1989 when no one else would. She read my CV, looked over her glasses, and said, "Well, you'll learn." I have spent thirty-seven years trying to be worth that sentence.

There is a stretch of footpath above Chagford where the bracken comes up to your knees in August. She walked it every year for fifty years, and the last time I went with her she stopped halfway, leaned on her stick, and said, "You know, I'm not sure I've ever been bored a day in my life." I think of that often.

For my mother — the only person I ever met who could win an argument by simply waiting.

Eleanor was my form tutor in 1982 and I was, by every objective measure, a difficult girl. She wrote on my final report: "Headstrong, unafraid, kind underneath. Will be perfectly fine." I am sixty-one years old and I have carried that sentence in my wallet for forty-three of those years.

I am five and a half and Grandma Nell taught me how to whistle with a blade of grass. I can do it now. I will teach my brother.

She brought me soup the week my husband left. She did not ask a single question. She read me an essay by Joan Didion and went home. It was the most useful thing anyone has ever done for me.